Scientists within 1-billionth sec of copying Big Bang

GENEVA: Scientists at the world's biggest atom smasher on Tuesday started colliding particles at record energy levels, opening a new era in the quest for the universe's deepest secrets.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said it had unleashed the unprecedented bursts of energy on the third attempt, as beams of protons thrust around the 27km accelerator collided at close to the speed of light.

"This is physics in the making, the beginning of a new era, we have collisions at 7 TeV (teralectronvolts)," said Paola Catapano, a CERN scientist and spokeswoman.

Collisions among the 20 billion protons emerged in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at 1106 GMT, creating powerful but microscopic bursts of energy mimicking conditions close to the Big Bang that created the universe. "We're within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang," CERN spokesman James Gillies said.

CERN director-general Rolf Heuer could barely contain his excitement by video conference from Japan: "It is a fantastic moment for science ." Within an hour, physicists from dozens of countries were marvelling at their initial observations.

"What we saw within the detector was a firework, a lot of energy, something completely different from what we have seen till now," said Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for one of the biggest parts of the experiment.